Forget equality? security and liberty in the "war on terror"

Alternatives

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 293-314

  Aradau, Claudia ^a  

^a OPEN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Equality; Liberty; Political theory; Security; Terror

Indexed keywords

EID: 57349198270     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540803300302     Document Type: Review

References (84)

1. Jean-Claude Paye, Global War on Liberty (London: Telos Press, 2007).
2. Vivienne Jabri, "War, Security, and the Liberal State," Security Dialogue 37, no. 1 (2006).
3. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, "Governance, Risk, and Dataveillance in the War on Terror," Crime, Law, and Social Changed (2005);
4. Claudia Aradau, "Law Transformed: Guantanamo and the "Other" Exception," Third World Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2007);
5. Didier Bigo, "Globalized (Insecurity: The Field and the Ban-opticon," in Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala, eds., Terror, Insecurity, and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes After 9/11 (London: Routledge, 2008):
6. Michael Dillon, "Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence," International Political Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007);
7. Mark B. Salter and Elia Zureik, eds., Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security, Identity (Cullopton: Willan, 2005).
8. On neoliberal and the demise of the liberal subject, see Wendy Brown, "Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy," Theory and Event 7, no. 1 (2003);
9. on empire and war, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004);
10. on the erasure of boundaries between internal and external security, see Didier Bigo, "The Möbius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies)," in Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory, ed. Mathias Albert, David Jacobson, and Josef Lapid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001);
11. on the new rationalities of catastrophic risk, see Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, "Governing Terrorism Through Risk: Taking Precautions, (Un) Knowing the Future," European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 1 (2007), and Marieke de Goede, "Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination," Security Dialogue 39, nos. 2/3: 155-176.
12. The words freedom and liberty will be used interchangeably here. For a discussion of the subtle difference between liberty and freedom in Arendt, see Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, "Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?" Political Theory 16, no. 4 (1988).
13. For an exception, see Anthony Burke, "Freedom's Freedom: American Enlightenment and Permanent War," Social Identities 11, no. 4 (2005). Although the trade-off between security and liberty has been debated in political theory (e.g., Jeremy Waldron, "Security and Liberty: The Image of Balance," Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 2 (2003): 191-210, these discussions remain normative, without taking into account the social practices that claims to security and freedom support.
14. Drucilla Cornell, Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 88.
15. Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom. Lectures, 1964-1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 197.
16. Ibid.
17. "Government through freedom," a phrase coined by Nikolas Rose, refers to these technologies of the self that turn freedom into something positive and create incentives for the self to become responsible, autonomous, and self-governed. These technologies have been well documented by an important body of literature that analyzed neoliberalism or advanced liberalism by drawing on Foucault's analyses of governmentality. See, for example, Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Marianna Valverde, Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
18. Home Office, Counter-terrorist Action Since September 2002 (2004 [cited February 20, 2005]); available at www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs/counter- terrorism.
19. Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1993).
20. Sean Loughlin, Looting in Iraq: "Stuff Happens" (CNN, 2003 [cited August 26, 2005]); available at www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/11/sprj.irq. pentagon/.
21. John Carvel and Lucy Ward, "Huge Majority Say Civil Liberty Curbs 'Price Worth Paying' to Fight Terror," Guardian, January 24, 2007.
22. Tony Blair, Speech by Tony Blair MP, Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party: 26 September 2006 (2006 [cited November 4, 2006]); see www.labour.org.uk/index.php?id=news2005&ux-news%5Bid%5D=primeminister &cHash=7e84d2fbb8.
23. Guardian, "Blunkett Plays Down Fears Over Anti-terror Bill," November 13, 2001.
24. Anastassia Tsoukala, "Democracy in the Light of Security: British and French Political Discourses on Domestic Counter-Terrorism Policies," Political Studies 54 (2006): 611.
25. Burke, note 6, p. 328.
26. Klaus Günther, "World Citizens Between Freedom and Security," Constellations 12, no. 2 (2005): 385.
27. Barry Hindess, "The Liberal Government of Unfreedom," Alternatives 26, no. 2 (2001): 97.
28. Liberty, The Impact of Anti-Terrorism Powers on the British Muslim Population (2004 [cited August 30, 2007]); available at www.liberty- humanrights.org.uk/publications/6-reports/anti-terror-impact-brit-muslim.pdf.
29. Evelien Brouwer, "Immigration, Asylum, and Terrorism: A Changing Dynamic: Legal and Practical Developments in the EU in Response to the Terrorist Attacks of 11.09," European Journal of Migration and Law 4 (2003): 411.
30. IOM, "International Migration and Terrorism" (Brussels: IOM, 2003), pp. 23-25.
31. Theodor Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001).
32. Ibid.
33. Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question: "What Is Enlightenment?" in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
34. Michel Foucault, "What Is Critique?" in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997).
35. A Lockean perspective on the liberty/security balance could also be considered. For the purposes of this article, it is not the distinctions between Hobbes and Locke that are of interest but the way in which they both set out a framework that prioritizes security by limiting freedom. For an interesting illustration of the Lockean perspective, see Mark Neocleous, "Security, Liberty, and the Myth of Balance: Towards a Critique of Security Politics," Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 2 (2007): 131-149.
36. Richard Ashcraft, "Ideology and Class in Hobbes' Political Theory," Political Theory 6, no. 1 (1978): 27-62;
37. Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, and Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx (London: Routledge, 1994).
38. Balibar, note 29, p. 16.
39. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 99.
40. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 233.
41. Ibid., p. 365.
42. Ibid., p. 369.
43. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or the Long Parliament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 3.
44. R. B.J. Walker and Andrew Neal, "Notes on European Liberty and Security: Problems, Principles, and Contradictions" (FP5 Project Elise: European Liberty and Security, 2005).
45. "Man is made fit for society, not by nature, but by education": David Burchell, "The Disciplined Citizen: Thomas Hobbes, Neostoicism, and the Critique of Classical Citizenship," Australian Journal of Politics and History 45, no. 4 (1999).
46. Ibid.
47. William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 27.
48. Paolo Virno, Grammaire de la multitude: Pour une analyse des formes de vie contemporaines, trans. Veronique Dassas (Paris: Editions de l'Eclat & Conjonctures, 2002), p. 10.
49. Malcolm Bull has suggested that it is a "faction" as a simulacrum of the people and not the multitude that Hobbes opposes. Malcolm Bull, "The Limits of Multitude," New Left Review 35 (2005). Yet, factions are a "multitude of citizens," in many ways similar to other illicit organizations that Hobbes finds dangerous.
50. Richard Ashcraft, "Ideology and Class in Hobbes' Political Theory," Political Theory 6, no. 1 (1978): 42.
51. Jacques Rancière, Les noms de l'histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 43.
52. Ibid., p. 369.
53. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Siverthorne, in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
54. R. B.J. Walker, "International/Inequality," International Studies Review (2002): 8.
55. Ibid.
56. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
57. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 67.
58. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971), p. 303.
59. This critique of Rawls is expounded in Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Avionsnous oublié le ma? Penser la politique après le 11 septembre (Paris: Bayard, 2002).
60. Wendy Brown, "Tolerance and/or Equality? The Jewish Question' and the 'Woman Question,'" differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2004).
61. Wendy Brown, "American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization," Political Theory 34, no. 6 (2006): 692.
62. Claudia Aradau, Rethinking Trafficking in Women: Politics out of Security (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). The literature on "government through freedom" that analyzes the technologies of governing through freedom in neoliberalism does not discuss these differences in the ideal of freedom. Focusing on fleshing out the political rationalities and technologies of freedom in neoliberalism, it does not inquire into the conditions of possibility of its "degradation."
63. For example, Anne Phillips, "From Inequality to Difference: A Severe Case of Displacement?" New Left Review 224 (July/August 1997), and Chris Armstrong, "Complex Equality: Beyond Equality and Difference," Feminist Theory 3, no. 1 (2002).
64. Judith Squires, Gender in Political Theory (London: Polity, 2000), p. 118.
65. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 9.
66. Joan Wallach Scott, The Conundrum of Equality (Institute for Advanced Studies, 1999, www.sss.ias/publications/papers/papertwo.pdf [cited August 20, 2007]).
67. Geneviève Fraisse, La controverse des sexes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), pp. 251-253.
68. Balibar, note 29; Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality, ed. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, trans. Howard Rouse and Andrei Denejkine, in Cultural Memory of the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006);
69. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics (London: Verso, 1995).
70. Menke, note 60, p. 163.
71. Ibid., p. 170.
72. Ibid.
73. Kristin Ross, "Rancière and the Practice of Equality," Social Text 29 (1991): 67.
74. Jacques Rancière, Solange Guénoun, and James H. Kavanagh, "Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement," Sub-Stance 29, no. 2 (2000): 3.
75. Rancière, note 60, p. 48.
76. Ibid.
77. Vanessa Pupavac, "Therapeutics Governance and Psycho-Social Intervention and Trauma Risk Management," Disasters 25, no. 4 (2001).
78. House of Lords, A and Others v. Secretary of State for the Home Office (House of Lords, 2005 [cited 3 March 2007]); available at www.parliament.the-stationeryoffice.co.uk/pa/ld200405/ldjudgmt/jd041216/ a&oth-1.
79. Council of Europe, European Convention on Human Eights (1950 [cited May 7, 2008]); available at www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html#C.Artl.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. House of Lords, A (FC) and Others (FC) (Appellants) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent) (2004) (2004 [cited May 7, 2008]); available at www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldjudgmt/ jd051208/aand-1.
83. UK Home Office, The Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005 [cited March 3, 2007]); available at www.homeoffice.gov.uk/security/terrorism-and-the-law/ prevention-of-terrorism/.
84. Amnesty International, "Prosecute Don't Persecute," Says Amnesty as Law Lords Hear Appeal on Control Orders Cases (2007 [cited May 8, 2008]); available at www.amnesty.org.uk/news-details.asp?NewsID=17406.